The purpose of the project is to lay the basis for the development of a behavioral assay of intellective deficit in early infancy. Normal and high-risk infants are compared in terms of their ability to code relational features of stimuli under the assumption that the processing of patterned information is fundamental to emerging intelligence. Habituation-recovery procedures are being used to assess sensitivity to invariant spatial, temporal and social relationships between 52 and 78 weeks conceptional age. Overall, the findings indicate that preterm infants are much less sensitive to the configuration of stimulus elements than full term infants.